James Beirne
As a revolutionary and a thinker, James Connolly’s innovations have inspired virtually all subsequent organisers and organisations within the Irish left. Outside Ireland, though, he is relatively little known, while within academia, he has been treated more as a political actor than as a serious political theorist. One exception to this trend is a recent article by Edward McNally, who writes that Connolly ‘is widely recognized as a founder of the national and labor movements in Ireland: an organizer, agitator, journalist, trade union leader, and, ultimately, republican martyr. Yet his status as a political thinker has been curiously diminished and overlooked.’
This is even more curious when we compare Connolly to Frantz Fanon, who, like Connolly, thought deeply about colonialism and capitalism as he participated in revolutionary struggle. Not only is Fanon read widely by the international left, he is increasingly a staple of university reading lists across a range of disciplines and is cited regularly even by those who do not share his revolutionary socialist politics. While there are reasons, touched on below, that Connolly has not yet received the same treatment, there is no reason why he should not.
Participating in similar struggles in different contexts, Connolly and Fanon began to think along similar lines. The themes examined by both authors are rich and varied, but reading Connolly and Fanon alongside each other reveals striking similarities. I have chosen three to begin with: Both were anticolonial socialists who believed that national liberation required more than seizing the means of production, but would also encompass the liberation of the psyche of the colonised nation. Both were ardent internationalists, stressing the relationship of particular struggles to the global fight against capitalist imperialism. And both believed that transformative action would have to be revolutionary in nature – up to and including the use of organised violence. These three similarities remain deeply relevant for today’s radical politics and suggest that like Fanon, Connolly was a thinker of global relevance.
Liberating the national psyche
Even a casual glance at their writings shows that both Connolly and Fanon believed socialism to be the path to anticolonial independence. Connolly, for instance, wrote that ‘a free Ireland with a subject working class’ was impossible, while Fanon also expressed a clear commitment to socialism. More than that, both explicitly rejected the idea that nationalisation of the economy was sufficient, with Connolly calling for ‘co-operative control by the workers of the machinery of production’. While Fanon was a third-worldist who cautioned decolonising countries about adopting economic programmes developed in non-colonial contexts, he was firmly on the side of socialism, writing: ‘the capitalist way of life is incapable of allowing us to achieve our national and universal project…. the choice of a socialist regime, a regime entirely devoted to the people, based on principle that man is the most precious asset, will allow us to progress faster in greater harmony’.[1]
Beyond the economic implications, both held that it was necessary for colonised peoples to take back control of their national psyche, liberating it from what Fanon called the ‘inferiority complex’ of the colonised and giving the independence struggle the confidence to establish a society free from colonial culture. Economic dominance came first, but it enabled psychological domination. As he famously argued, ‘You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why a Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to addressing the colonial issue.’[2]
For Fanon, ‘white’ and ‘black’ did not just signify the colour of one’s skin, but the ‘epidermalization’ of colonial power relations. The ‘inferiority complex’ did not have individual psychological roots, but social ones. Colonialism’s ‘final aim’ was for the colonised to believe that they were intrinsically savage, not capable of self-government, and that the ‘colonial mother’ was needed to ‘[protect] the child from itself’.[3] Thus, the primary theme of Fanon’s first three books is how anticolonial struggle can and must escape this colonised mindset by forging a revolutionary Indigenous culture of national pride, a concept known as ‘critical return’.
Though he did not have the term, Connolly had the concept of critical return. Its most direct statement is found in the forward to Labour in Irish History, which was intended to combat the view that Irish culture was intrinsically aristocratic. Rather, values like kinship and reciprocity were deeply rooted in the Irish nation. As cultural theorist David Lloyd has shown, a major underlying theme of Connolly’s work is that, though half forgotten, these could be revived and used as the basis for a revolutionary movement. Mere weeks before the Rising, Connolly gave Irish culture a nearly mythic significance in the struggle for independence, writing:
The Irish people, denied comfort in the present, seek solace in the past of their country…. If that spiritual conception of religion, of freedom, of nationality exists or existed nowhere save in the Irish mind, it is nevertheless as much a great historical reality as if it were embodied in a statute book, or had a material existence vouched for by all the pages of history.
If both believed in socialism, neither Connolly nor Fanon thought it was attainable by a psychologically colonised people. Before the means of production could be seized, colonised workers would first have to heed the words of that other great philosopher: ‘Emancipate yourselves from mental slavery – none but ourselves can free our minds.’
Universal liberation and the national struggle
Though both thought that the nation was an essential vehicle of struggle, Connolly and Fanon were fundamentally internationalists whose first loyalties were to the global fight against colonialism and capitalism. Fanon, indeed, fought not only for the independence of his native Martinique, but for Algeria. Connolly, of course, fought for Ireland – but more than that he fought his whole life for international socialism. Unlike many of his peers, Connolly did not believe that the class struggle had to wait until the national struggle was won but that the two were historically united. Against the nationalist sentiment that favoured the Catholic Jacobites in the Williamite War of 1689, for example, he critiqued both sides, declaring that ‘Neither fought for Ireland, but only to decide which English king should rule Ireland…. [and] the right to rob the Irish people.’ As he succinctly proclaimed in one of his final articles, ‘The cause of labour is the cause of Ireland, the cause of Ireland is the cause of labour. They cannot be dissevered.’
The latter sentence of this quote is often left out, but it is essential. It demonstrates that for Connolly, the overlap between the two causes was not a matter of coincidence, but of nature. Those seeking national independence have a duty to be internationalists, and world socialists should support anticolonial movements. Unlike many of Europe’s socialist leaders, Connolly opposed participation in the first world war, decrying England’s hypocritical claim to defend ‘small nationalities’ like Belgium, even as Ireland, Egypt, and many other nations were held under subjugation:
if my memory is not playing me strange tricks, I remember reading of a large number of small nationalities in India, whose evolution towards a more perfect civilisation in harmony with the genius of their race, was ruthlessly crushed in blood, whose lands were stolen, whose education was blighted, whose women were left to the brutal lusts of the degenerate soldiery of the British Raj.
Like Connolly, Fanon liked to use sarcasm to point out colonial hypocrisy, but the similarities are more substantive. While Fanon wrote on behalf of colonised nations, and while the specificity of Black struggle was a central theme of his writing, the title alone of The Wretched of the Earth makes clear that the struggle was global. The ‘wretched’, the most oppressed, were the ones who would have to undertake the fight. But liberation was for all.
Each country might have to wage its own national war for independence, but this did not preclude solidarity and mutual aid. Moreover, as Geo Maher suggests in Decolonizing Dialectics, the fight would not stop at the national border: rather, it would progress, first uniting disparate groups within the nation, then freeing the country from colonial rule, then engaging in the intercontinental struggle, finally liberating the earth in a Hegelian transcendence of racism, colonialism, class, and nation. Such a philosophical register was not Connolly’s own, but Marilyn Nissim-Sabat’s analysis of Fanon’s universalism applies equally to him: ‘[L]iberation is a matter of realizing the universality, the oneness, or unity of humanity. This is the place from which Fanon speaks in all of his writings. This sense of the oneness of humanity was literally his genius’.[4]
Revolutionary liberation
That Connolly and Fanon believed freedom would entail revolutionary violence needs no reference to their writings, for both demonstrated it through deed. Connolly’s participation in the Easter Rising was his most famous act, and while Fanon’s requests to join the frontlines of the Algerian struggle were repeatedly denied, he joined the resistance against Vichy rule in Martinique and the Free French Forces.
Their writings do, however, firmly disprove the myth – which exists for both – that they believed that violence for its own sake was revolutionary in character. Rather, the act of taking up arms, risking one’s extinction for the sake of escaping domination, was the very basis of human freedom. Indeed, as Connolly’s last statement makes clear, the willingness to die for freedom was itself what made colonial rule ‘a usurpation and a crime against human progress’.
For it is colonialism itself that is imposed by violence, as Fanon explains: ‘The arrival of the colonist signified syncretically the death of indigenous society, cultural lethargy, and petrifaction of the individual. For the colonized, life can only materialize from the rotting cadaver of the colonist. Such then is the term-for-term correspondence between the two…’. Violence ‘rids the colonized of their inferiority complex’, ‘armed struggle mobilizes the people, [pitching] them in a single direction, from which there is no turning back.’[5]
Returning to Connolly
These three thematic similarities between Connolly and Fanon are not coincidental, nor are they disconnected from each other. Rather, they express the reality of the colonial situation – any colonial situation, whether Ireland in 1916, Algeria in 1963, or Palestine today. There are many reasons why Fanon’s writings are better known than Connolly’s – despite his early death, he left behind several monumental books whose innovation and interdisciplinary academic rigour are hard to overstate. Fanon was highly educated and made long-form, systematic arguments that engaged with academic literature and formed in many respects to academic conventions. Compared to Connolly, Fanon also had the benefit of fifty additional years of development of Marxist and psychoanalytical thought. Connolly, who wrote mostly short form, popular pieces, was more concerned with directly agitating the population than formulating a comprehensive theory.
Nevertheless, Connolly was a serious thinker. If his readers have to do some additional work, reading across numerous of his writings in order to try to get at the unifying themes, that does not diminish the value of his insights. Considering Connolly’s writings in relation to Fanon, as I did at greater length in my academic article, benefits our appreciation of them in several related ways. Any two authors’ writings into conversation allows us to gain new insights into each. That is, Fanon’s thought can augment Connolly’s – and vice versa. In the same way that Connolly’s experience allowed him to build on Marx, we can build on Connolly. Identifying connections, similarities, and differences between the thinkers allows us to develop a fuller appreciation of what each contributes to our understanding of politics. Connolly may have left some gaps in his theories, but with careful reasoning and comparative analysis, we can fill them in and extend them. Conor McCabe’s current project of compiling Connolly’s collected works is an essential step in this direction.
Perhaps even more important than any specific insight we might gain, however, is the principle of what we are doing. By critically comparing the work of Fanon and Connolly, we are saying that we can compare the work of Fanon and Connolly. We are saying that, in some sense, Connolly is Fanon’s peer. And if Fanon has made such contributions to our understandings of the world, what is missed if we overlook Connolly?
[1] Frantz Fanon (2004), The Wretched of the Earth, Grove Press, pp. 56.
[2] Fanon (2004), p. 5. See also Fanon (2008), Black Skin, White Masks,Pluto Press, p. 4.
[3] Fanon (2004), p. 149.
[4] Marilyn Nissim-Sabat (2010), in Fanon and the Decolonization of Philosophy, edited by Elizabeth Hoppe and Tracey Nichols, Lexington Books, p. 49.
[5] Fanon (2004), 50–51.
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